Too Many Serves Spoil the Broth...

Ji-Soo Woo Asked 16 years ago

Hi Alois

This past year I've really gotten into serves. I've been playing around with my serves like a kid with a new toy. I've spent many hours by myself practicing serve after serve. When I'm not at the table, I've been watching footage of professionals doing their serves (or watching the pingskills secrets of serve DVD!)...or else thinking up some new variation of a variation of one of my serves I could try out. Every time I go to play, I have a new serve I want to try out.

While this is a lot of fun, it does have its drawbacks. I've got so many serves in my head that none of them are particularly dependable. Sometimes, especially before an important match, I just blank out and can't serve at all. And even when I am serving well, I generally find I lose a point on a service error for every point I win thanks to my serve. In other words, net effect zero or negative.

My question is, is this good investment for the future? By continuously pushing the envelope and trying different serves, will it help me become that much a better server in the future? Or is it best that I concentrate on a handful of serves and practice them very hard until they become second nature?

Alois Rosario Answered 16 years ago

Hi Ji-Soo,

I think you have made the investment now. Start to refine what you are doing with a couple of the best serves. you will notince most players only have one or two serves that they use, but they have lots of variation with the spin, speed and placement of those serves. They have confidence in what they are doing because they have perfected those few serves and know what types of returns they are looking at.

It is probably time for you to narrow your focus. Look at variation and building confidence in the few serves. When you go to serve in a match it should be a matter of what spin, speed and placement you are going to use, not hoping that the serve goes on the table.

I hope this helps with your thinking.

← Blocking loops ! Sidespin strokes →

Charles Unknown Posted 16 years ago

TAke it from me Ji-Soo. Take only at least 2-4 of your best serves and refine them. If you know too many serves and plan to use it in a match, it will just slow down your progress and will disturb your mind thinking about what you want to serve next. Unlike you, I only know a few serves like Tomahawk Serve which I vary from Spin, Speed and Placement.(I could have learned more if I had the DVD) That way, I could focus on improving my strokes and playing style. It's like this, your serves are like Pokemon. Let's name two players, A and B. A captured 6 Pokemon while B only captured 3.After a month, they had a battle. You noticed that A had a hard time training his Pokemon because it's too many while Player B only had 3 Pokemon to train. Player A's pokemon are all at level 20 while Player B's Pokemon were around 50's Guess who won. PLayer B. Get the point?

Cihan Unknown Posted 16 years ago

I think you should divide your serve practice into two: work and play. Work should be devoted to mastering some solid serves with similar postures and arm/wrist motions (i.e. so that it is harder to read). One very important point is that you definitely want to have at least one top-spinny serve and a back-spinny serve with similar motions. This way, you can milk a lot of points from players who can't read your serve. Play should be devoted to experimental "projects" for the future and whatever you want to do. (One thing I like trying to do is, for instance, to get the ball back on my side of the table on the third bounce. This would be a useless serve as the ball has to be quite somewhat high to accomplish this but still, it's a lot of fun and impressive to the onlookers.)

Too Many Serves Spoil the Broth...

Ji-Soo Woo Asked 16 years ago

Alois Rosario Answered 16 years ago

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Thoughts on this question

Charles Unknown Posted 16 years ago

Cihan Unknown Posted 16 years ago

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